Research Guides: Public Health Writing Center: How to Write Your Paper

As a public health student and practitioner, you will research health topics, design programs and initiatives, and propose policies. Sharing your work with other people helps us all be healthier. You may write articles for policymakers, other public health practitioners, members of the public, and other people. Your assignments will ask you to practice writing articles for each of these audiences. The tips in this section will help you write different kinds of articles.

You will use similar skills and strategies to write research papers, briefs, and policy papers. You will need to gather information about your topic. You will need to organize the information in a way that makes sense.

Use the navigation tabs to learn more about specific kinds of papers.

Writing in Public Health

Communication is a key part of public health practice. Public health practitioners inform people about health situations and encourage people to adopt the most effective strategies for improving health. Many of those messages are shared in writing. That means that public health practitioners need to know how to read and write effectively.

Boston University's Public Health Writing Resource Center
Boston University has a guide with useful general tips on writing in public health.

Using Your Sources: Quoting, Summarizing, and Paraphrasing

Summarize, paraphrase, and quote to include others' ideas in your own writing.

Summarize: Summarization condenses the information to a few general statements. Summarize when you find the same information in many sources. Summarize when one source provides a lot of context for your project.
Paraphrase: Put the information in your own words. Paraphrase when one idea is important but the exact wording does not matter. You will often find paraphrasing useful if multiple sources have similar information.
Quote: Use a small portion of another person's words, exactly as that person wrote or said them. Put quotation marks around the words or phrases you borrowed. Quote when information is unique to one source and is not easy to reword. Quote when one source uses especially compelling language.

How to Recognize Plagiarism: Tutorial and Tests
Learn how to use your sources in your paper in this tutorial for graduate students. You already know that you need to cite your sources. Explore how to blend information from your sources with your own ideas. From Indiana University.
Skip the certification test; it is only for Indiana University's own students.
Academic Phrasebank
The "Introducing Work" and "Referring to Sources" pages suggest phrases to use in your paper. Use the suggested phrases to help you evaluate others' ideas and include them in your paper. Other parts of the site might be helpful as you write other parts of your paper. For example, those parts might help you write your methods or conclusions. From the University of Manchester.

APA Citation Style Guide

Citation Style Guides: APA